As an advocate for creating equity in the American theatre through consciously changing whom we choose to represent on stage, I am often told, “but that would interfere with the creative process.” The playwright’s vision, some argue, would be compromised by any effort to pursue casting quotas. The dictum “don’t tell the playwright what to write,” though generally sound dramaturgical advice, can be used as an excuse not to do the hard work necessary to creating change.

Not so with Manahatta, by Mary Kathryn Nagle, which premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in March 2018. Since being chosen for OSF’s 2018 season almost a year ago, Manahatta has undergone not only the usual rewrites, but also a very specific transformation initiated by Artistic Director Bill Rauch: Nagle flipped one of the main characters from being a man to being a woman. Not only did this not interfere with her vision, but she is actually able to better represent the cultural reality of her subject matter.

Manahatta tells the story of the 2008 financial crisis alongside the story of the “purchase” by the Dutch from the Lenape of what is now called Manhattan. In what is becoming a Nagle trademark, every actor plays a role in each time, often transitioning without leaving the stage, so that history becomes the present and the present becomes history right before the audience’s eyes. One actor plays …

Though Shakespeare created around 798 male characters, his dramatic corpus contains only about 149 female ones. That’s a ratio of roughly sixteen to three. Yet every year the best conservatories accept at least as many women as men—if not more—and every year they graduate both men and women trained to act in Shakespeare plays. The women are even trained to swordfight. Ninety nine percent of them never get to use that skill.

The difference undoubtedly accounts for why so many talented women create their own opportunities to play the full range of Shakespeare’s best roles, including male ones. This month two productions on opposite sides of the country are providing women with just that chance. The Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company is running Hamlet, directed by and starring Lisa Wolpe, and Taffety Punk in Washington, D.C., is producing Riot Grrrls: Titus Andronicus, directed by Lise Bruneau.

Titus is the fifth all-female Shakespeare production of Taffety Punk. Their first, Romeo and Juliet, was staged as a companion to/protest of an all-male production of the play at D.C.’s prominent The Shakespeare Theatre Company. Bruneau, inspired by Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9, and Fiona Shaw’s Richard II, has always been interested in the performance of gender. However, with her Riot Grrrl productions, she’s interested less in staging a commentary than in staging good Shakespeare.

Lisa Wolpe has been running the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company for 20 years. This is her second Hamlet. Like Bruneau, she doesn’t consider what she does a “concept.” She does it because the parts are great, because she loves it, and because she’s good at it.

Though both directors are wary of doing anything in production to comment on the sex of the actors, they acknowledge that inevitably text about gender—and there is a great deal of it in Shakespeare—becomes especially loaded when the entire cast is made up of women: Just imagine Claudius as a woman in drag criticizing Hamlet for his “womanish” tears. Both directors have also dipped their toes into gender flipping. Bruneau’s Measure for Measure included a pregnant Provost, which I imagine highlighted the hypocrisy of punishing Juliet for something everyone is doing. Wolpe has made her Rosencrantz a woman and believes that doing so reveals something about the nature of the relationship between Rosencrantz and Hamlet.

“Rosencrantz is a player, a woman with an agenda, who wants certain things for herself. She is a player who then gets played by Hamlet,” said Wolpe, during our interview. “And there are women like that. There are women characters in Hamlet like that. Gertrude stands twenty feet away from Ophelia and watches her drown.”

Though the actors in these companies are in it for the opportunity to play great roles and not to study sociology, the fact that their characters are men means that acting the part is different than it is when they play characters of the same sex, and that involves understanding the ways behavior is gendered. Bruneau has interesting insights into the outside-in process of building a character, who has a different relationship to the world by virtue of his gender than the female actor.

“We have found that changing your physical stance changes the impulse,” she said. “Once you change that it can start opening doors to a different perception of information and a different way of responding. It leads to a lot of discoveries about the differences of the sexes, of which there are many.”

Bruneau volunteered an example. “One of the most basic differences we’ve found is that women tend to sort of reach their chin forward as they’re talking and listening, and really try to encourage the other person to speak. We reach forward with our whole face. Men tend to sort of sit back and to receive and they tend to not reach. So that’s a very simple physical difference that makes you realize that they are dealing with everything based on a completely different type of experience than you are.”

According to Wolpe, women tend to break the alignment and the angles in their bodies, their wrists, their elbows. “Usually they’re off their voices, their heads are tilted, their faces are going in one direction and their hips in another, their hands turned open in a helpless ‘what can I do?’ supinated position—not because they’re doing anything wrong, but because that’s what you’re trained to do as an American girl,” she said.

“You’re trained to disempower yourself, to make yourself look less strong, more delicate, more ‘oh push me off of my pumps and I’ll be unable to resist the rape’ type of a thing. It’s not believable in a man who doesn’t have any threats.”

Wolpe went on to elaborate, “This is a crazy quick map through how to play a guy, but basically: it’s not your fault, you don’t take it on, and if you hurt somebody’s feelings, they’ll get over it or they won’t but it’s really not your problem. The thing about women is we usually anticipate having an apology before there’s even an event. Men don’t negotiate. They command.”

The end game for Wolpe is a production in which the quality of the text and the acting enable audience members to forget that most of the roles are men being played by women. However, when I saw Hamlet, I did not ever forget that the performers were all women. In fact, I yearned for the fact to be more foregrounded. Though Rosencrantz was a woman, no use was made of the possibility that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern could be a couple, which would have been logical and, given, the eroticism that pervades Shakespeare’s male-male pairs, not un-Shakespearean. Similarly, the revelation about Gertrude’s character did not result in her coming across as any more cold-hearted or self-serving than she usually does.

Bruneau reports similar responses from critics in D.C. who expect her productions to do more with gender, but the Riot Grrrl aspect of her shows represents a desire to be accepted as a serious artist and not be singled out for being a woman doing a man’s thing. Similarly, Wolpe repeatedly expressed frustration that people expect her to do anything other than what the greatest actors of their times have always done when playing these roles: Play them well.

Unfortunately, productions that keep all the male characters male inadvertently preserve the gender status quo: In their play-worlds, the men still have all the power. On the other hand, flipping some of the male characters and gendering them female would reveal a world in which women can be powerful, violent, and vengeful, too. Women can woo their lovers, protect their families, and command armies. (They could in Shakespeare’s time, too, whether he represented them as such or not.) The practice also reinforces a false binary in which men are always masculine and women are always feminine, whereas in reality some men and women defy gendered norms of behavior.

As pleased as I am to watch well-trained women deliver fantastic performances of the kind they too rarely have an opportunity to give, I yearn for a production that reveals that behaviors defined as masculine can be embodied both by women playing men, and by women playing women. Changing gender pronouns does not disrupt the verse—he, she, her, and him are all monosyllabic. Though Anglo-Saxon names like John might require some tinkering, modern audiences are unused to Latin, so they can easily accept most character names as either male or female. If anything, the timelessness and universality of Shakespeare’s stories become even more apparent when they are populated by people of all colors, shapes, sizes, and sexes.

In the meantime, both companies continue to receive rave reviews. Though some Shakespeare purists may still wring their hands at the prospect of women playing men’s roles, Wolpe says her experiences have been overwhelmingly positive.

“There’s never been a negative comment about an all-female production. There never has been in twenty years. I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘You’re ruining the play.’”

Now that these companies, along with Judith Shakespeare and The Queen’s Company in New York as well as others across the country have proven that women are capable of playing roles with all of the depth and complexity of Shakespeare’s male characters, I hope they’ll turn to creating play-worlds in which women don’t have to pretend to be men in order to be powerful.

In her 20 years running the company, director and actor Lisa Wolpe has played Romeo, Iago and Shylock, to name just a few of the Bard’s most famous male characters. She travels around the world advising artistic directors on creating diversity in their theaters. She directs and acts at the most prestigious Shakespeare festivals in the country. But when Wolpe approached foundations for support for her all-female Hamlet, she was told, “That sounds like a gimmick.” On a break from rehearsals, she vented to Ms.:

It’s not a gimmick, it’s a time-honored tradition. Every great actress has played Hamlet. It’s not a new thing. I think it’s sad that we have to keep reinventing this. It’s not a gimmick; you just don’t want to fund women.

Despite a dearth of resources, Wolpe is forging ahead with the show, which runs from August 30 to October 27 at The Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles. All of the roles will be played by women, from the domineering King Claudius to the meddling Polonius to the melancholy Dane himself, who will be played by Wolpe.

Asked whether her work has a social purpose, she has three answers: A. Yes, I’m providing opportunities for women; B. Yes, there are things about Shakespeare’s plays you don’t realize until you have an all-woman cast; and C. Stop asking me that.

Undoubtedly, women rarely get to play the best roles in the Western canon—with the exception of a few standouts such as Clytemnestra, Hecuba and Cleopatra—because the roles are mostly for men. Compared to New York City, which has two all-women classical theater companies (the Judith Shakespeare Company and The Queen’s Company) and countless other theaters that experiment with non-traditional casting, LAWSC is the only company of its kind in L.A.

In many ways, Shakespeare was very much writing about gender. In his plays, women are constantly disguising themselves as men, men fall in love with other men and every play examines the power imbalance in male-female relationships. In most productions, these issues are rendered invisible by casting and staging that reinforces contemporary gender norms, whereas all-female productions can keep gender and sex in the front of an audience’s mind.

In this production, Rosencrantz—a friend of Hamlet’s employed by the King to lead Hamlet to his death—has been cast to actually be a woman. Wolpe explained her reasoning:

I think that the way men use women as sexual pawns is fascinating, and so I asked Claudius to just undress [Rosencrantz] with his eyes and use her for further bait to draw Hamlet on, which I think she’d be expected to do. And the reward she gets is death. I think that’s how a woman would be utilized then, and maybe it makes you think about her for a heartbeat longer than if she was a guy who was a spy and then was put to death.

Though Rosencrantz is the only character Wolpe has flipped (the rest of the male roles are filled by women playing men), it’s not hard to imagine further ways in which the gender issues in Hamlet might be foregrounded by the sex of the actors. After all, Shakespeare’s Hamlet coined some of Western civilization’s most famous misogynist phrases. Hamlet famously complains of his mother, “Frailty, they name is woman!” (1.2.6). He rails against himself for acting like a “whore” for talking too much: “Why, what an ass am I! … That I … Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words” (2.2.58). And he tells his girlfriend to become a nun rather than marry because women always make fools of their husbands: “Get thee to a nunnery, go” (3.1.11). These words will undoubtedly resonate differently when spoken by a woman, even one in convincing drag.

So is there a social purpose to what the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company does? Don’t forget Wolpe’s third answer: c. Stop asking me that. In our interview, her frustration with being treated differently from male actor/directors, despite 20 years of experience and recognized expertise, was palpable:

People always talk to me like, ‘So, could this be applicable in the third grade? Maybe we could strengthen the girls in the Christmas pageant.’ Stop infantilizing me because I’m female. Ian McKellan and I have sat and talked about our Richard III. I know as much as anyone. It’s not different. We are doing exactly the same thing as Kevin Spacey, who runs a theater company and played Richard III, but nobody asks Spacey if he’s thought about doing it with high-school students. It’s just that you expect me to be different, like someone who doesn’t want all that.

Having met Wolpe and sat in on rehearsal, I can testify that she wants all that and is capable of handling all of it, too. Nevertheless, she says a lack of funding may make this LAWSC’s last production.

Wolpe’s muse, the Victorian actor Charlotte Cushman, was famous for playing men—”breeches roles,” in the parlance of her time. Cushman described herself on her own Hamlet poster as “a lady universally acknowledged as the greatest living tragic actress.” In true superstar style, Cushman announced her retirement from the stage many times before she was really done. Hopefully Wolpe is only following in Cushman’s footsteps when she threatens the end of her company, but you never know. Catch her while you can by buying tickets here. Even if you’re not in L.A., you can still defy the patriarchy by supporting what is clearly not a gimmick.

Photos of Bernhardt and Cushman poster from Wikimedia Commons

Holly L. Derr is a feminist media critic who writes about theater, film, television, video games and comics. Follow her @hld6oddblend or on her tumblr, Feminist Fandom.

It’s no secret that this summer’s movies suck for women. It’s been mentioned on Vulture. NPR did a story about it. The New York Times covered it. Even Fox News ran a piece about it.

Yet Jodie Foster has a leading role in the new action movieElysium. How’d she score it? Foster makes a point of having her agent specifically seek out leading-man scripts that can be flipped. Her role in Elysium was originally written for a man.

More actresses might want to do the same, because the Movie Insider database of films in development and pre-production contains films in which there really is no reason that the main character can’t be a woman.

A third installment of Night at the Museum is in the works, for example, but Ben Stiller is not yet signed on to reprise his role. In the first movie of the series, much of the plot and humor relies on the fact that the main character is new on the job–in fact, one could argue that deviating from this set-up is why Night at the Museum: Battle at the Smithsonian grossed only half of what the original did in its opening weekend. The film’s subtitle, Brother From Another Mother (seriously), indicates that Night at the Museum 3 will return to its previously successful formula and introduce a brother to Stiller’s character who has taken over for him at the museum.

Other than the dated and possibly offensive reference in the title, not much would have to change to make the new character a sister. After all, the job of the watchman is essentially that of caretaker, which is a job women do every day. The style of the film does require an actor capable of the kind of comedy for which Stiller is known, but there’s no dearth of female comedic geniuses around these days. The role could be played hilariously by Amy Poehler, Kristen Wiig or Sarah Silverman, to name a few.

Kristin Scott Thomas, who recently told The Daily Mail that she has become invisible compared to younger female actors, could play the lead in When the Starlight Ends, in which “a novelist finds himself with the ability to rewrite his past,” an ability he uses to try to reunite with a lost lover, or in Tomorrow, in which “a man travels back and forth in time trying desperately to prevent the murder of his family.” It shouldn’t be hard to sell audiences on a woman whose primary motivation is, in the first example, love, or, in the second, saving her family. Gender-swapping these roles would also make the films the first major movies in which the female character is the one who can time travel.

To suit Hollywood’s penchant for the heteronormative, wives would probably be flipped to husbands, but that’s part of the fun of cross-sex casting: Not only do women get to play characters who are ambitious and powerful, but men get to play characters who are compassionate, domestic and invested in their relationships above all else. In reality, some men actually are. In this way, the practice has the potential to dismantle deeply held assumptions about the inevitable relationship between gender and sex.

Producers are unlikely to take my suggestions for several reasons:

A) Hollywood has little to gain from subverting the patriarchy.

B) Hollywood relies on international markets, where “woman-centered movies don’t sell,” or so the wisdom goes.

C) American storytelling is still driven by the assumption that is at the heart of the Western canon: The male experience is the universal human experience, whereas the female experience is specialized, driven by biological factors, the absence of which prevents men from being able to see themselves in female characters.

This is, of course, total bullshit. The assumption persists partly because stories in which a male character is defined by his reproductive organs are relatively rare, so biology does not constitute a barrier to empathy, whereas many–if not most–female characters are written as driven by their biology, usually made manifest in characters focused on finding a mate and/or having and caring for children. In the absence of roles written for women in which they desire other things, too–like power, money or justice–gender-flipping provides audiences with female characters designed to represent the universal human experience.

Being able to imagine “men’s” roles being played by women requires practice, but once you get going the possibilities are endless. Imagine a gender-flipped Weird Science (yep, Universal is remaking Weird Science), in which two geek girls use their technological expertise to create the ideal man–played by Channing Tatum or Ryan Gosling, natch. Such a choice would provide a powerful antidote to the original film’s overt male gaze and reveal that the media’s narrowly defined representations of who is beautiful distorts women’s desires as much as it does men’s.

Game of Thrones fans might like to see Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth) in the reboot of another ’80s classic, Highlander. Ryan Reynolds is currently slated to play the sword-wielding immortal who spends centuries fighting and finding other immortals and taking their power. Many people would consider the character too violent for a woman to play, but Lucy Lawless and Miranda Otto have proven that women can handle swords, and Christie’s background in gymnastics would make her a formidable foe in any century.

No doubt a producer brave enough to flip Highlander would face intense backlash from the largely male fanbase of the original. But science fiction and fantasy are perfect genres for gender-flipping: In a made-up world, anything is possible. Speculative fiction exists to show not just who we are but also who we can be.

Gender-flipping introduces the possibility that women can represent the human experience, leading eventually to more parts written for women that do that. As more creators include women characters who are complex and universal, more people will realize that this makes entertainment better, not worse. Eventually, we won’t even be surprised by it.

Feminist concern with representations of women in comic books and video games is hardly a new thing, nor is it always greeted with support—just ask Anita Sarkeesian, whose Tropes Vs Women has inspired intense backlash from territorial gamers. But as more and more women enter these previously male-dominated fields, the possibility of feminists effecting change from within the industry has, logically, skyrocketed. Take the case of Meteor Entertainment/Adhesive Games, where a female employee recently punked her boss, and with outstanding results.

Meteor Entertainment is the creator of the free-to-play mech game Hawken, in which users build their own virtual robots and use them to fight other users’ robots. But the tale of the master prank actually begins with a tumblr called The Hawkeye Initiative.

Founded on December 2, 2012, this project creates and solicits original art that addresses the over-sexualization of women in comics by replacing them with a male hero—Marvel’s master archer Hawkeye—standing in the same pose. (Moviegoers may know Hawkeye from Jeremy Renner’s hotsy-totsy portrayal in The Avengers.) A manly man with super strength and agility, Hawkeye posed as, say, Black Cat from The Amazing Spiderman makes a powerful visual point: that comic book women’s costumes, body shapes, and poses undercut their superpowers by overemphasizing their sexuality.

A Meteor employee and fan of the Initiative, who goes by the handle K2, was disgruntled by prominently displayed office art of a scantily-clad woman. (K2 dubbed the woman “Ruby Underboob.”) She conspired with co-worker and artist Sam Kirk to change out the poster with one of a man, equally sexualized and equally naked. And thus was born “Brosie the Riveter.”

Luckily for our merry mischief makers, Meteor CEO Mark Long loved it. In fact, he copped not just to having sexual art around the office, but also to contributing to the creation of that art. He wrote in an email: “I didn’t just hang the picture on the wall. I collaborated on the design with the artist. He and I came up with the Rosie idea. The underboob is pretty much all my fault. Since then, I’ve learned about The Hawkeye Initiative and the larger gender-flip meme going on in comics and games, which is righteous and transgressive. I’m a dumbass, but at least now I know I’m a dumbass!” He and his employees are now in an “open dialogue about gender in comics and gaming.”

K2 told XX Factor, “I’m glad to see awareness of the gender-flipping meme spreading. I hope and expect to see a lot more of it, and other innovations on the theme, too. There’s more than one right way to do this. The Hawkeye Initiative has put out a call to action for more real-world plays in the gender equality space. The more—and the more real-world—the better.”

All too often, Internet feminism of the kind practiced by The Hawkeye Initiative preaches to the choir, rarely resulting in or even aiming for concrete outcomes. In the case of Meteor Entertainment and their intrepid employees, though, the idea behind The Hawkeye Initiative produced tangible results. That’s my kind of feminism.